(Columbus, Ohio, December 14, 2012) – Member-libraries of Ohio’s academic library consortium will soon have the option of adding another powerful tool to improve searches patrons make for the information they need.
The Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK) and its Library Advisory Council today selected EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) to provide the EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) as a shared service to OhioLINK libraries.
“OhioLINK provides an enormous number of valuable resources, such as 17 million articles from 10,000 e-journals, 46.5 million physical items in the central catalog and hundreds of thousands of images, e-books and other materials,” said Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Jim Petro. “This new technology helps provide a cost-effective and innovative way for students, librarians and researchers to save time locating the right materials and resources.”
“Currently the vast resources of the consortium are in separate silos of content, and it can be very difficult for our users to discover the wealth of resources that OhioLINK and their local academic libraries provide,” said Gwen Evans, executive director of OhioLINK. “Making the EBSCO Discovery Service available to the students and faculty in participating Ohio institutions will allow them to navigate seamlessly across all the resources available to them—it is discovery and access on a scale impossible to provide in more traditional ways.”
EBSCO Publishing President Tim Collins says the agreement allows each OhioLINK institution to build the discovery service it needs.
“OhioLINK is providing its member libraries with a tremendous opportunity to incorporate EBSCO Discovery Service into their libraries to expand access to their collections and ultimately provide a search experience that is as unique as each library’s collection,” he said.
The term “discovery layer” refers to the benefit library patrons get when search results are combined from various sources (books, print journals, electronic journals, eBooks, electronic theses and dissertations, etc.) and shown in one displaythat gives the number of relevant results among those disparate sources. In simple terms, users get a single search box discovery tool that searches across all databases and catalogs. In this way, items not normally presented in search results get “discovered” by library patrons.
“This is a great advancement for Ohio researchers,” said Kelly Broughton, assistant dean for Research & Education for Ohio University Libraries and chair of the Discovery Layer Task Force. “Library budgets are shrinking and a discovery layer is a cost-effective win-win. Researchers save time locating the right sources—whatever the format—through an interface that undergraduates can more intuitively navigate but that also allows libraries to highlight the great variety of materials in which they’ve invested.”
OhioLINK grew out of a 1987 recommendation by the board’s library committee that “the state of Ohio implement, as expeditiously as possible, a statewide electronic catalog system.” The consortiumcreates a competitive advantage for Ohio's higher education community by cooperatively and cost-effectively acquiring, providing access to, and preserving an expanding array of print and digital scholarly resources; by efficiently sharing the collections of member libraries; and by centrally hosting digital content to advance teaching, learning, research and the growth of Ohio's knowledge-based economy.
About the Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK)
Established in 1992, the Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK) is Ohio’s statewide academic library consortium and serves more than 600,000 end users. A member of the Ohio Technology Consortium of the Ohio Board of Regents, OhioLINK provides a competitive advantage for Ohio’s higher education community by cooperatively and cost-effectively acquiring, providing access to and preserving an expanding array of print and digital resources, and by centrally hosting digital content. Together, OhioLINK and its member libraries provide users access to nearly 50 million books and other library materials, more than 100 electronic research databases, more than 81,000 e-books, thousands of images and videos, and millions of electronic journal articles. www.ohiolink.edu.
About EBSCO Publishing
EBSCO Publishingis the producer of EBSCOhost®, the world’s premier for-fee online research service, including full-text databases, subject indexes, point-of-care medical reference, historical digital archives, and e-books. The company provides more than 350 databases and more than 325,000 e-books. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals and magazines from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers (Academic, Medical, K-12, Public Library, Corporate, Government, etc.). EBSCO is also the provider of EBSCO Discovery Service™(EDS), which provides each institution with a fast, single search box for its entire collection, offering deeper indexing and more full-text searching of journals and magazines than any other discovery service (www.ebscohost.com/discovery). For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com, or contact: information@ebscohost.com. EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.
XXX
Editor’s Note:
Contact: Eliza Sproat, Project Manager, OhioLINK, 614-485-6730, esproat@ohiolink.org, www.ohiolink.edu
Mr. Jamie Abel, Media and Communications Director, Ohio Technology Consortium, 614-292-6495, jabel@osc.edu
